"It started with a woman who was an interface designer. Her husband was
a jeweller, and he'd died of that nerve-attenuation thing, before they
saw how to fix it. But he'd been a big green, too, and he hated the way
consumer electronics were made, a couple of little chips and boards
inside these plastic shells. The shells were just point-of-purchase eye
candy, he said, made to wind up in the landfill if nobody recycled it,
and usually nobody did. So, before he got sick, he used to tear up her
hardware, the designer's, and put the real parts into cases he'd made
in his shop. Say he'd make a solid bronze case for a minidisc unit,
ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise,
rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people
liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in
something that felt like it was _there_. . . . And people liked touching
all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone. . . . And once you had the case,
when a manufacturer brought out a new model, well, if the electronics
were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones
in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better
functions.

And it turned out some people liked _that_, too, liked it a lot. He
started getting commissions to make these things. One of the first was
for a keyboard, and the keys were cut from the keys of an old piano,
with the numbers and letters in silver. But then he got sick . . .

So after he was dead, the software designer started thinking about all
that, and how she wanted to do something that took what he'd been doing
into something else. so she cashed in her stock in all the companies
she'd worked for, and she bought some land on the coast, in Oregon"